“Sarah.” Panicking, I frantically ran my hand around inside the doona to make sure the hard packer hadn’t escaped overnight. When my fingers brushed it, I breathed a big sigh of relief.
Sarah watched me with amusement. “Fun night?” She asked rhetorically, taking a sip. “You know, a lesser person would totally have taken a photo of this carnage. That would be one for Schoolgirl’s Facebook.”
“You should!” Bree piped up, the traitor. “It was a really fun night!”
I snaked my arm around Bree’s head and covered that big mouth of hers with a firm hand. “What she means to say is ‘Thank god you’re not a lesser person, because then Min would have to start an album on her own Facebook dedicated to all the times you look truly awful’.”
Sarah scoffed. “Please, there would be exactly zero photos in it. I always look amazing, even when I’m bloated, and aching, and drinking whatever the hell this is.” She held it up to read the dangling tag. “’Warm orange’. That sounds like something I’d paint my wall. Anyway, as much as I’d love a blow by blow of what happened on this ‘really fun night’ of yours—” she snickered at her own wording, “Junior here is probably going to end up playing on that trampoline at some point and I’d rather not know what nefarious things have happened on it. I’ll leave you two lovebirds to clean up.” She winked at us, and then walked back to the door, laughing to herself.
I expected Bree to harp at me for ruining her photo op when I released her, but she just looked thoughtful. “You said ‘her own Facebook’,” she pointed out as we began to try and unearth our clothes.
Once we were dressed, I gave in and let Bree take a less risqué morning after shot of our sleepy eyes and messy hair. She forwarded it to herself, and then handed my phone back, grimacing. “Don’t look at how many messages you have,” she warned me.
I took it off her and just put it straight into my pocket. “Noted,” I told her and climbed off the trampoline.
It was easy enough to get the hard packer into my bedroom—Bree and I just bundled it inside the doona and walked casually past Rob and Sarah with it—but I couldn’t get it into the bathroom without it being clear I was smuggling something under my hoodie. With Bree giggling from my bedroom behind me, I made a frenzied run for it in case the other two chose that exact moment to walk down the hallway. They didn’t, the contraband remained uncompromised, and operation Transport Packer was a success. Triumphant, I hopped in the shower and cleaned it.
Before I did, I spent a moment or two holding it against my naked body, trying to get used to seeing it there so I could decide if I needed a real one or not. I couldn’t get used to it, though. Having something sticking out of me like that looked sudden and out of place. I liked using it with Bree because it made the things I felt I should be doing with her actually possible, but I was glad it wasn’t permanently attached. I let it fall, and was then faced with what was actually between my legs, and that wasn’t right either. Feeling weird, I washed it anyway. I was glad Bree accepted my body—although remembering her touching it made me cringe—but given the choice, I’d sooner just level everything from my shoulders to my knees and have nothing there at all.
I stopped lathering the body wash for a moment, listening to myself. ‘Just level everything’? Did that mean I was genderqueer and not a budding trans guy after all? That was a tough question this early in the morning, so I put the packer aside and got back to my shower.
I moved on to washing my hair while I went over the other stuff that had happened last night, most notably that my crazy fucking girlfriend thought it would be a fantastic idea for two adults to jump on a rusty trampoline in the dark. I chuckled at the memory. I wondered if we really would end up going trampoline shopping at some point. The store clerks would probably assume we were just shopping for our non-existent kids, I thought as I got out of the shower, dried myself, and went to tuck the clean packer in my hoodie on the floor. I loved the idea of secretly buying a trampoline for us to play on instead. I could picture Bree pretending to be super-serious about its key features before she insisted on climbing right up onto it inside the store to test that they—
—the LED on my phone was still blinking.
“Oh, fuck off,” I said aloud to it, my pleasant fantasy interrupted. I dropped my hoodie right back on the floor and wrapped the towel around my waist so I could go and brush my teeth. I should have just left my phone in the bedroom; my fucking mother could wait. Fuck! And I’d been in such a good mood!
I kept thinking I could hear my phone buzzing while I was brushing my teeth, but when I paused to listen, the bathroom was silent. I wonder what her fucking problem is, I thought bitterly, scrubbing at my gums. She’s probably found the wow-so-perfect placemats for the banquet, or maybe the exact shade of mascara I had to wear with my wedding dress, or maybe she knows I’m lying to her.
I stopped brushing, staring at my reflection. Chill out, Min, I thought, you know it’s not that. I started brushing again slowly. I was stressing too much again, wasn’t I?
I pulled on fresh boxers and jeans, and then struggled into my binder. I hadn’t read the texts all night, though, probably not since before Bree was working on her assignments. That was—I counted—maybe 10 hours? 12 hours? That was a long time. What if me not answering made her suspicious and she had guessed I was lying?
God, Min, get a grip, I told myself harshly. But not knowing what the messages actually said eventually got too fucking much for me, and I ended up very angry at everything and sitting on the edge of the bathtub with my phone.
None of them were Mum saying she knew I was lying.
“See?” I said rudely to the part of me that hadn’t shut up about that being a possibility, and kept reading. In amongst the wedding chatter and advice about Henry and Alice, Mum wanted ‘a nice’ photo of Henry and me because, ‘I don’t understand why my only daughter would need to make her own mother beg for photos of her and her soon-to-be husband. Doesn’t she care how difficult it is being so far away?’.
Fuck you, I thought, and then felt really guilty. Mum was definitely being very passive-aggressive and I hated that, but behind all her bullshit she probably was really lonely and actually missing me.
Aside from that photo Bree had just taken—which I was momentarily tempted to send—I had some old ones of Henry and me on my phone, so I opened my gallery to try and find one I hadn’t sent her yet. Given how much I hated photos of me back when I used to dress like a Stepford Wife, there weren’t that many.
There was a time-stamped one of Henry and me sitting out on the balcony on the first night we’d become more than friends, and he was kissing my cheek as he took the photo. God, he looked young there. There was another one of us at JFK Airport as he landed and I departed—our business trips nearly aligned. There were a few more in various locations, and in all of them he had that big warm smile of his, and in all of them, I had a very tight, forced smile and a layer of fresh makeup I’d applied before I let anyone point a camera at me.
Seeing those photos now, I remembered how terrible I thought I’d looked then, and how I’d been completely sure everyone had thought Henry was too good for me. Mum routinely even said exactly that to me: ‘I don’t know what he’s doing with someone like you, but you should marry him before he realises!’
Objectively, the woman in the picture wasn’t punching above her weight, though. She was pretty; she just looked tense and uncomfortable because deep down, she knew something was wrong.
It hurt to think of Henry going back over these photos, knowing what he knew about me now. It was all so clear to me, seeing them with fresh eyes: I was unhappy then. I hoped he knew that I loved him anyway.
As for Mum… I shook my head. I didn’t know how Mum could look at any of these and think she was doing the right thing by pressuring me to marry him. I looked miserable.
Sharp knocking on the door startled me. “Do I need to issue an eviction notice to you two? There’s only one toilet!” Sarah called th
rough the door.
Shit. “It’s only me,” I called back. “I’ll be out in a sec.”
I smuggled the packer out past her under my hoodie and, fortunately, Sarah was too preoccupied with getting to the toilet as soon as possible to care about what I was carrying. I still couldn’t shut my door behind me fast enough.
Bree was inside getting ready for her own shower and already buzzing about what she wanted to do with her free time. “I was thinking that we haven’t really looked around where Sarah lives, have we? Like, we just go to my house and come back, we don’t look at what’s close by. According to Google Maps,” she showed me, “there are all these parks and monuments and stuff everywhere. Plus, we’re so close to the harbour. We should totally drive around and see what’s here before you have to move out and...” Her sentence trailed off when she looked back up at me. “What’s wrong? Why are you stressed out again? You were so happy just before!”
I gave her a look while I was hunting through my case for some fresh socks; what always happened?
She understood and pulled a face. “Don’t check them, Min, seriously.” She sat on the bed. “I was reading this thing online which was talking about how you should set, like, a specific time during the day to stress about things so it doesn’t ruin the rest of your day. Maybe you should do that.”
I shook my head as I braced myself against the wall to pull my socks on. “She’d get suspicious.”
“So you’re just going to let her ruin your whole day then?”
“No…” I said, standing and letting my arms flop to my side. I tried to put Mum’s crap out of my mind. What had Bree been saying before? “Yeah, let’s go for a drive around here today, maybe we could even go out for breakfast.”
After Bree had her shower—in record time, I might add, fuelled by the promise of a fancy breakfast—we put on our winter coats and went driving around the suburb to look for somewhere nice to eat. There was a French Patisserie off a park near the station, so I sat down at an outdoor table near the grass and sent Bree inside with strict orders for comfort food.
The morning sun was nice and warm, and I had my face upturned to it, trying to relax. That was until Bree returned to the table with two cute little tarts, and in the process of taking pictures of them and cooing over how pretty they were, said, “These are probably not that hard to make, you know. I could make something like this for when we have that dinner with my parents!”
The smile fell off my face.
That’s right, I thought. Bree was planning to put me in a room with the woman who’d nearly rammed my car and a man who freely told Bree she was stupid and useless. Not only that, but she was expecting me to voluntarily tell them over a nice home-cooked meal that their daughter was dating not only a Korean, but also that he was transgender. As if I didn’t have enough on my plate to worry about.
She noticed my frown. “It’ll be fine,” she said, reaching over to give me a loose hug before returning to her tart. “Even if they’re not okay with me dating you, I’m sure they won’t throw you out of the house or go off at you or anything. They wouldn’t do that, I’m sure of it. At least, I think so. So, yeah, if they have a problem, they’d probably be nice to your face and then tell me later to stop seeing you.”
“How comforting.”
“Seriously,” she said through a mouthful of tart, a spoon in one hand and her phone in the other. “If the whole dinner goes really badly and it’s clear they’re in a terrible mood, you can always not tell them and just hope that Andrej doesn’t get to them first. But I think it will be okay.”
That wasn’t much consolation. I still didn’t understand why having me meet her parents was so important to her anyway; in the last two years since Andrej had defrauded them of all their money, they’d treated her pretty poorly. And what kind of parents let their teenage girl stay over at an adult’s house for months on end without even meeting the person? I kept my mouth shut, though. I had a feeling it would upset her.
Suddenly, Bree made an excited noise. “Oh, there is a recipe for them online!” she announced, leaning closer to her phone to make sure before she held it next to the tart to show me. “Look! Yeah, these are a definite possibility! Mum loves sweet things covered in icing sugar. Serbian food is full of them. What do you think? Do you think it’s a good idea?”
I think food isn’t going to make a difference, I privately decided, stroking her hair. Not unless there’s some magic food that makes people friendly and open-minded.
Bree obviously harboured some belief that food would do that to her parents, because exactly the right food was suddenly very important. She spent each night either curled up next to the potbelly stove pouring over recipes on her sparkly purple tablet, or banging around Sarah’s kitchen looking for obscure utensils and trying to figure out how to cook the things she wanted to make back at her parents’ house.
It was weird not having her draped all over me constantly, and especially weird that even when we did go for a nice drive around the suburb and find a park with an amazing sunset view, instead of watching me attempt to speed-paint it in the 15 minutes before the colours faded, she was staring intently at an article on her phone.
Feeling a bit neglected, I took my rough painting home to clean up, but got stuck on a text Mum had sent instead. “I’ve spent every day of my life for the past few years taking care of my old, sick mother and making sure she’s happy and comfortable in her last days. My own daughter can’t even find the time to send her own mother just one single photo…”
I was kind of over it. “I hate photos, you know that.”
“Well I hated working as a cleaner for more than a decade to feed and clothe you, but I still did it because you’re my daughter. Anything you asked for, I’d give it to you. But you won’t even send me a photo.”
I grit my teeth, saying aloud, “Anything I ask for? How about leaving me the fuck alone for once?” God, my mum was a nightmare.
I needed to get away from this fucking phone. I stood up, looking around for Bree. She wasn’t in here, which meant—there was a crash from the kitchen—that she was in there instead. I went to find her; I could use some Bree cuddles right now.
She was leaning over the counter with her apron on, very, very carefully trying to carve something into a carrot while an instructional video played on her tablet. From the intensity of her concentration, you’d have thought she was performing brain surgery. While I was watching her, the carrot slipped from her fingers and she yelped. Her brow was set in a deep frown. “Fuck!” she said, hurriedly sorting through all the chunks of carrot in front of her one-by-one for a fresh one that hadn’t been carved. “I can’t do it, Min! I’ve been trying for fucking ages and I can’t do carrot flowers!”
I would have hugged her, but she didn’t seem very cuddly right now. “Do we really need carrot flowers?”
“Yes, they’re the hero of the dish, they make the colour pop,” she told me, obviously quoting a cooking blog. “And this dish is really pretty, and it’s like a mixture of North-East Asian and Western cuisine and it’s perfect, but I can’t fucking make it! What am I going to do?” She sounded really distressed, and restarted the instructional YouTube video she’d been watching so she could try again.
I didn’t want to interrupt her video, so I went back into the living room and sat down in front of my phone.
It was flashing again.
If I was labouring under any misapprehension that Mum would tire of the subject of weddings eventually, I don’t know what fucking planet I was on. Over the following few days, the steady stream of messages and emails and calls and links and every possible thing my Mum could send me was slowly taking up more and more of my time. It was like all she did all day every day was walk around shops looking for wedding ideas, or sit in front of her computer and copy and paste links for me to check out. She wouldn’t let me leave them either, if I missed something or forgot something, she’d call and call and leave message after message until I got bac
k to her. She hadn’t been this relentless since after she just moved to Korea, and it was fucking suffocating.
I didn’t know what to do about it, though. I thought I’d already done something about it by sending her the photo of the ring and telling her what she wanted to hear, but it didn’t seem to help at all.
To make matters worse, she’d keep saying things like, “I can’t wait to have grandchildren. I would have loved to have more children if your father were still with us, but I’ll never have the chance,” and, “All the terrible hard work I did my whole life will have been worth it when I see you walk down the aisle,” and, “You’re my only daughter, I’m so excited for your wedding! We have to make sure it’s perfect, because I only get one!”
And as much as I fucking hated what she was doing, I still felt guilty because didn't have anyone else, and she actually was stuck over in Seoul looking after Grandma with no one to help her. So, I kept answering those emails and messages, and reading those links she sent me.
I wasn’t much company for Bree that week, though. Not that Bree seemed that concerned, because she stressed about how close Tuesday was—the night both her parents were home at dinner time and the night that Andrej worked late—and had taken up permanent residence in Sarah’s kitchen so she could practice all the things she needed to do for it.
I quite liked all the interesting smells that were wafting into the living room as a result, but then again, I didn’t have terrible morning sickness.
I’d gone onto the decking one night to cool off and figure out what the fuck I was going to do to survive my mother, when the door slid open and Sarah came rushing out. She came right up to me and clutched me by my shoulders. “Help me,” she said in a pained whisper.
I laughed. “It’ll be over in a couple of days,” I promised her. “The dinner’s on Tuesday, apparently.”
“Two more days?” she asked, and then leant a hip against the railing and ran her hands over her face. “I can’t believe she’s still in there, cooking the same thing for like the hundredth time. Doesn’t she get bored?”
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